The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review
by Joshua Ho on September 17, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
GPU Performance
As said in the previous section, we'll look at game-based benchmarks to get a better idea of how the Snapdragon 801's Adreno 330 GPU performs.
Once again, there are really no results that stand out. I suspect that the metal frame helps to prevent thermal throttling in short benchmarks, but in most scenarios this doesn't really play out and there's no real way to establish long term performance as the GFXBench rundown test doesn't complete properly.
NAND Performance
NAND performance has been an ongoing issue since we first illustrated how poor NAND could easily become a massive detriment to user experience. While sequential reads and writes are generally at a good level these days, it’s the random read and write tests that can be incredibly poor, and these are often a good indicator of overall UI performance as something like installing applications can make a device unusable if storage performance isn’t good enough. In order to test this, we turn to Androbench with a few custom settings to best represent performance.
While the new Moto X doesn't quite top the previous Moto X in random write speeds, it's unlikely that the storage solution is worse. I found that the data and system partitions now use ext4, which means that the performance gains we saw with f2fs are gone. I'm not sure why Motorola decided to change back to ext4 given the performance gains that come with f2fs, but possible reasons include unforeseen conditions where f2fs could result in data loss compared to ext4 or difficulties in integrating f2fs support on Android. At any rate, the new Moto X is one of the best performers in this category, which should keep performance high after a year or two of use.
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AppleCrappleHater2 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
A dream comes true, finally, the first time in my life being the first to post a comment on a newly published article on AT.tipoo - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Get better dreams, lol. No one likes "first" comments.NeatOman - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Leave the guy alone, no one likes a bully... Well, unless its funny... But! Only sometimes were I can't help it laugh :)soccerballtux - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
I'm happy to hear he was so happy.on topic, as an avid user of MightyText (text from PC via wifi or cell data), my Nexus 5 battery woes are no more. Trimming txt usage off the screen on time has given me the battery life I required most days. I think this review neglected to mention the battery life savings available with this MotoConnect feature
CanvasExtractor - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Sadly Google crippled KitKat's SMS APIs so badly that MightyText cannot mark messages sent (as far as I can tell) or even show MMSes in the stream of messages you send and receive.Hopefully Google will take note and fix this, instead of forcing us to rely on per-device features ("bloatware?") to fix their problem.
craighamilton - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
Seems to be a nice phone, but when you look at consumer based rankings (such as http://www.topreport.org/phones/ for example) it is nowhere to be found within the top.n13L5 - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Too bad being from Greedle, it lacks a Micro SD card...I'd just buy it for the ultra cool bamboo otherwise!
marcokatz - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Back to topic: The Moto X 2 is a fantastic phone, that's for sure, and the only other phone that can compete with it is the HTC One M8. /Marco from http://www.consumertop.com/best-phone-guide/Mayuyu - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
BTW, is there going to be a iPhone review? Or has the Apple fans on staff left and there isn't anyone interested in doing iPhone coverage?Alexey291 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
They don't have a review device yet. Or aren't allowed to release the review until a certain date.So they spam all these crappy "there's swiftkey in ios now", "swiftkey works ok in ios" and "we found a leaked benchmark but we think it might be true" articles (aka clickbait articles).